Raking leaves has traditionally been a difficult spring and fall chore. The leaves can be blown or raked into adjacent woods or property in some rural areas, but in suburban areas this is not always possible or appropriate. One old method of handling a lot of leaves is to rake or blow them onto a sheet or tarpaulin and then haul them away. This works but generally requires more than one person and also a large vehicle.
Therefore, most people rake or blow the leaves in a pile and ultimately place the piles in individual bags or barrels for transport or pickup. The major problem with this is that typical lawn and leaf bags do not stay open without some additional support.
So, numerous devices have been developed to hold leaf bags open. The oldest method includes using a garbage can or barrel to support the bag from the outside. But, placing a bag inside a firm walled barrel or garbage can does not always work well: it is especially difficult to maintain the bag in the proper position during filling and it is also difficult to remove the bag from the container when it is full.
Other devices are designed to be placed inside the bag. Cooke, U.S. Pat. No. 4,760,982, for example, discloses three rigid panels hinged to form a trough to be placed inside the leaf bag. This device, however, has sharp edges and corners which tend to puncture or tear the leaf bags during insertion and removal. Also, the grip holes of this device are not placed appropriately for convenient handling. McEniry, U.S. Pat. No. 4,669,690, discloses a support structure for suspending an open bag from a wall. This device is simply not appropriate for yard work because it requires that the support structure be permanently attached to a wall-like structure. Corsaut, U.S. Pat. No. 4,664,348, discloses a trash bag holder which has a very narrow plastic strip with an intermediate straight portion adapted to engage either the ground or a wall hanging. See also U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,669,689; 3,754,785; 4,458,932; 4,537,337; 4,537,376; 4,445,658; 4,291,798; 4,457,483.
A product on the market under the trade name "CLEAN-UP CADDY" has a galvanized wire frame that holds only the mouth of the bag open so that it can be filled with leaves and garden waste. The primary problem with this device is that it can be difficult to install and, even when installed correctly, it holds only the mouth of the bag open making it difficult to fill the bag since the length of the bag is unsupported. Another product, sold under the trademark "EASY BAGGER", is a piece of plastic packaged and sold in a 4-inch diameter roll. This device is long enough so that it is intended to be used as an insert liner with all popular size trash, grass and leaf bags. If it worked as intended, this product would form a round container shape within and supporting the leaf bag. This product, however, is difficult to use for raking leaves: since it is round, there is no support surface and it cannot be easily used to rake leaves directly into the bag. Worse, because the product is packaged and sold in a four-inch diameter roll, by the time it is purchased and unpackaged, it has completely stress relaxed and stays in that small diameter roll form. The operating instructions say to "reverse roll" the product for use, but this is very difficult. When the product is inserted into a bag without reverse rolling, it returns to the very small diameter packaged shape. Even if the product is reverse rolled and inserted into a bag, it provides essentially no force against a leaf bag and the leaf bag will very quickly slide down the sides of the product.